This is a continuation of comments on Andrew Kirk's history of the Whole Earth movement Counterculture Green.
Kirk appropriately includes in his history the role of Gerard O'Neil's space colonies and the huge disruption it created in the environmental movement as the Luddites confronted the techno-enviro
futurists. Gerard O'Neil, the father of the American space colony
movement, was a physicist at Princeton who had a geek following for his
idea of creating a human inhabited satellite made out of moon material
at a stable point in the orbit between the moon and the earth (it is
called Lagrange 3, the L3 point, after the mathematician who discovered it).
What Kirk didn't know about was the origin of the project. Gerard O'Neil was at a physics convention at the Hilton Hotel in the Spring of 1973. Based on a comment by another physicist O'Neil took the chance to walk across the street to the Point Foundation office on the roof of Glide Church. I (as president of Point) had hired one of my former hippy staffers (Dick Austin) from the Bank of California to be the executive director of Point and turn-away all the grant seekers. Dick was great at turning people away and making them feel we loved them nevertheless. But when O'Neil walked in and talked about a space colony, Dick called me up immediately, knowing I had already started an organization called the International Committee for a New Planet. I took Gerard O'Neil to lunch, said I'd gladly give him $600 (and more later) for a conference of his geeks on the subject of space colonies.
Space colonies were a sci-fi fantasy at the time. No one, but no one considered the possibility that it could and should be done.
I set up one condition for my grant to O'Neil: the check would be made out to Princeton. O'Neil was baffled about my condition which I explained. This grant will make your project an official project of Princeton University and their administrators will treat it as matter-of-fact which is what we want.
Sure enough, I was right. Princeton treated it matter-of-factly, included O'Neil's conference in their ordinary conference press releases.
A month after the conference some New York papers picked up the story, then some New York magazines did too. They all laughed and ridiculed the idea.
That is how all new and innovative ideas enter our society, being laughed at. Within two years O'Neil was hired by NASA to start work on the design phase.